The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday announced it will hear a Mississippi case that is a “direct challenge” to Roe v. Wade, the case that found women have a constitutional right to abortion. The ruling by the strong conservative majority court could lead to overturning the landmark 1973 case that has been considered settled law for nearly 50 years.
The Court will hear argument in the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, on Wednesday, December 1.
The case focuses on a Mississippi state law that bans abortion after 15 weeks. Since 1973’s Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court has generally used a 24-week standard.
Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott just signed into law legislation that effectively bans abortion after six weeks. Many believe that law to be unconstitutional.
The architect of that law, former Texas solicitor general and Federalist Society member Jonathan Mitchell, was exposed last week as having co-written an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court that says women use abortion as an alternative to contraception and could merely stop having sex if they are unable to access abortion.
In that same brief Mitchell writes that the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling finding same-sex couples have a right to marriage, and an even earlier ruling that say people of the same sex have a constitutional right to sex, should be overturned.
He also calls same-sex marriage a “judicial concoction.”
“The news is not as good for those who hope to preserve the court-invented rights to homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage,” Mitchell writes. “These ‘rights,’ like the right to abortion from Roe, are judicial concoctions, and there is no other source of law that can be invoked to salvage their existence.”